Very powerful swiss-army knife toolkit with great analytics support.

Pros

The IBM Marketing Cloud provides incredibly strong analytics and is integrated into many other services.

Cons

The IBM Marketing Cloud purely serves a single purpose, and if you want other tools you will have to invest in other IBM software as IBM makes several products with focused feature lists instead of a few products with broad feature lists.

Silverpop, now IBM Marketing Cloud offers robust marketing automation, dated UI means learning curve

Originating in the Email Service Provider (ESP) space, Silverpop was acquired by IBM and has evolved to become IBM Marketing Cloud. The core feature set still revolves around email with sophisticated features such as "Send Time Optimization" which samples users opens and schedules each contacts mailings for when they are most likely to open your email. Building on a simple workflow system, Marketing Cloud now offers Blueprints for the most common opportunities such as warming campaigns, retargeting and automated responses. A recent rearchitecture has brought the user-interface in line with other IBM Blue Mix and Commerce platforms. The updates also mean that IBM's mix of SAAS such as the new Customer Analytics and the existing WebSphere Commerce content platform. The future looks bright for Marketing Cloud with coming integration with IBM Watson preparing to lead the way with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence guiding contact segmentation and product targeting. But its current position places it in steep competition with market leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager and Marketo. The promised integration with Watson and the recent updates with SMS and push notification integration merit Marketing Cloud a closer look when looking for a marketing automation solution.

Pros

Flexible integration and reasonable pricing to add a comprehensive feature set for the digital marketer.

Cons

Parts of the UI have yet to be updated hiding much needed functionality deep in menus. The reporting module needs to be revisited with an archaic interface and burying much needed web tracking features.

Abysmal failure

Just fine if your emails are not professional grade or missions critical.

Pros

They were one of the least expensive options out there. Very hyped up and robust systems. Convinced our marketing department that they could deliver

Cons

Many of their basic features don't function as expected. Their hyped up options never materialized. It tooks months of testing to figure out how to get their system to accept what we were sending. Frequent outages shut functions down. They developed a bug that silently stopped responding to hard bounces, which caused thousands of black-list email addresses to build up in our lists. When notified them of the error, rather than fix the error and purge the stale emails, Silverpop's response was to turn off our accounts sending and deny everything. In attempting to work with them we are realizing that we as a customer know more about email systems than their technical employees. Checked Glassdoor review on them to confirm everything I suspected was true

It is a useful tool when you have strategies associated with digital marketing.

Definitely the best benefit is reflected in the return on investment, since it uses a digital marketing platform based on the cloud and is more easily integrated with other applications and customer data sources.

Pros

Now it's called Watson Campaign Automation (IBM Marketing Cloud) allows you to offer your clients exceptional experiences throughout the purchasing process, using customer data, providing value information extracted from analytics and automating multi-channel interactions. Is a digital marketing automation platform designed to put the power of data in the hands of the marketer. Use behavioral data from any source to create consistent campaigns wherever your customers are through channels like email, web, mobile apps, SMS, social, group messaging and more.

Cons

You must have a great knowledge in the area to know how to interpret the data, in the same way the information reflected is quite complex.

Great Product for Mid-Size Businesses

Pros

Setup of the system and getting everything established is a very quick process, particularly if you have used Silverpop previously. It very quickly allows you to add users (unlimited) and assign permission levels. Mailings are very easy to create, although the WYSIWYG mailing editor isn't the best (an entirely new mailing creation process is going to be implemented in the somewhat near future from my understanding). Hopefully, IBM's acquisition of Silverpop will add some resources to get things done faster and offer some more advanced features. Silverpop also has an annual conference (Amplify) in May each year that is outstanding. It's great, particularly for new users, to really become immersed in the system and learn best practices and how to use some of the more advanced functionality.

Cons

There is slow implementation of UI fixes and enhancements. Testing of the automated mailings is daunting and difficult.